Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

Greeting, movie fans! Welcome to a fresh perspective, an alternative look at this year’s Oscar contenders. It’s fresh because I’m making it up as I go, giving opinion more weight than fact. It’s alternative on account of I haven’t seen most of the movies.

It’s like this: I’ve got two middle-school-aged kids, an overworked wife, and a schedule crammed with doctor/dentist/orthodontist appointments, work meetings, impulse sleepovers, school concerts, recitals, sports practices, and the occasional hangover. Throw in a limited amount of disposable income, and you can see why I can’t go see a movie every damn weekend. I probably get to a movie theatre once, maybe twice in a year. If a movie doesn’t have a trailer playing on Nickelodeon or the Disney Channel, I’m probably not going to see it until it’s out on DVD. Even then, I’ll usually have to watch it some afternoon while I’m folding clothes.

While this scenario might not make me the optimum Oscar picker, I do have my opinions. And this here bully pulpit. So enough pussy-footin’! Let’s get to it!

internet technology

A single project in Idaho has finally been awarded a grant from the federal government intended to improve broadband Internet access in rural areas.

According to a press release, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) Project has been awarded $6,142,879 in loans and $6,142,879 in grants to provide a FTTH broadband system offering broadband services to anchor institutions, critical community facilities, and approximately 3,770 unserved and underserved households in the communities of Plummer, Worley, Tensed, and DeSmet, as well as isolated farms and rural home sites on the Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation in North Idaho.

Three other Idaho projects could still be awarded funds.

Column: idaho legislature

Just days after a spat in which the Idaho Senate refused to hear a bill to eliminate a House proposal for a 1 percent cost of living adjustment to state retirees, which Governor C.L. “Butch” Otter also weighed in on, another potential turf battle looms—one that could doom the carefully crafted education budget, scheduled to be voted on Wednesday morning by the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee (JFAC).

In Tuesday’s meeting of the House Education committee, Chair Representative Bob Nonini, R-Coeur d’Alene, strongly criticized the process by which JFAC Chair Senator Dean Cameron, R-Rupert, had set up meetings with education stakeholders in order to determine the best way to make cuts to the education budget that would cause the least damage to schools and students. The meetings resulted in a proposed budget bill and an unprecedented dozen pages of intent language explaining it last week, which was supposed to culminate in a vote on Monday but which was postponed until Wednesday. Nonini issued a number of strong statements indicating that he believed JFAC was not paying enough attention to the education committee, which is supposed to be making policy decisions.

“I don’t know how he can criticize,” said Cameron, when informed of Nonini’s remarks. “He was part of the process.”

From the Idaho Panhandle

Being town residents who don’t keep our own animals, every year it’s a challenge for us to find something to feed the raspberries. The first year we had them, I was able to barter some editing work for goat droppings, which I’m sure all readers will recognize as a heck of a deal. It made for great raspberries, too.

But the following year my goat contact was gone. Persistent questioning among friends did not reveal further obliging goats, but finally, at high school soccer game, I was able to locate a source of similar blessings from a flock of sheep. This too made for great raspberries, and we pursued this course for several years until we tired of transporting the stuff in the back of the car.

This year, however, we received a delivery. 

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

The big news today is that President Obama wants to reduce the size of our nuclear arsenal. That’s a good start. He might just earn that Nobel Peace Prize yet. Now how about doing the same thing with the rest of the military-industrial complex?

Current headlines may point at the bloated health care/insurance miasma as the biggest drain on our tax dollar, but compared to the defense budget, that’s just an election-year hockey puck being batted back and forth by the clueless boobs in Congress. Meanwhile, the defense department lumbers merrily along, sucking up half of this country’s resources into its gaping maw like Homer Simpson at a donut bar.

Column

Despite bipartisan opposition primarily focusing on end-of-life services, the health care workers “conscience bill,” which purportedly lets professionals deny making certain medications and services available based on their personal moral beliefs—but which critics say is an attack against birth control for women—passed the Senate on a 21-13 vote.

“The intent of this legislation is not to restrict or limit in any way health care services to women or men in Idaho,” said sponsor Senator Chuck Winder, R-Eagle.

When opponents brought up the fact that rural areas might already have a limited number of health care professionals to choose from, Winder responded that a survey supporters had performed of rural health care providers found that some of them didn’t provide those medications and services anyway.

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

Rain and snow are predicted for tonight. I’ll see it when I believe it, I’m thinking. Weather forecasters have the most difficult and thankless job this side of being Dick Cheney’s therapist, and Old Man Mother Nature seems intent on proving them wrong. Especially when it comes to snowfall in Montana’s Banana Belt.

When was the last decent snowfall we had? December? November? It seems like we had a couple of good storms early on, enough to open the ski areas and allow me to finally put the lawnmower away for the season. The kids got in one or two sledding sessions, but then the accumulation melted off. We’ve gotten a few minor dumps over the winter, but now we’re stuck in the February doldrums, with the filthy slush stubbornly clinging to everything like a wet booger on a clean finger.

From the Idaho Panhandle

It would be difficult not to be aware that an appalling number of Americans are fat, given the coverage this issue has had in the press of late. Recent data from the National Center for Health Statistics indicate that a third of us are overweight, and another third are obese.

But if you never read the paper and just looked around you in the Idaho panhandle, the problem might not seem so extreme. We have our fat folks, but we don’t seem to have the percentages that we read about. Most people here seem to be of a normal size.

This may be because a lot of north Idahoans hunt and eat lean game meat instead of burgers, or because we shiver off calories doing outdoor chores through a long cold winter, or because we have so many options for fat-burning activities like hiking, biking, and skiing, or even swimming in our big freshwater lakes.

But maybe it’s just because we have good leadership: Our state legislators won the Move It Legislative Challenge two years ago, and they’re in contention again. 

idaho legislature

Idaho Governor C.L. “Butch” Otter feels misunderstood, wishes people would have more compassion for him, and if the economy would let him, he would like to make people happy.

That’s the impression he wanted to leave with the Idaho Press Club during its annual breakfast with the governor this morning.

When newspapers describe budget cuts he’s making, which he said are required to maintain a balanced budget, “there’s always an assignment of some personal philosophy,” Otter said, who added that he “bristles” when an article assigns motivation to him without asking him why. “And then when I explain them I’m ‘covering up,’” he said.

This year, with the repeated holdbacks, has been particularly tough, Otter said. “Holdbacks are never fun.” Being able to give money to a program, or to tell an agency to go ahead and spend the money and it would be paid for out of a supplemental is a lot easier to deal with, he said. “I used to think it was the other way around, but I don’t any more,” he said, saying later, “I would like to see some compassion that this is a tough, tough position to be in, and it’s not fun.”

“Just once, I’d like to see a headline that says, instead of ‘Otter Cuts Grade School,’ ‘Otter Obeys the Constitution,’” he said.

(There you go, Governor.)

Generation Recreation

There’s something incredibly real that’s reflected in the efforts of Olympic athletes, who toil in anonymity for a shot at glory once every four years. When Tiger Woods’ apology statement interrupted my Olympic reverie on Friday, the contrast between the joy that accompanies Olympic success and the misery evinced by Tiger’s robot-like performance couldn’t have been greater.